Everybody who is known to be a psychopath is a bad psychopath, by definition; a skilled psychopath is one who will not let people figure out that he's a psychopath.
Of course, this means that the existence of sufficiently skilled psychopath is, in everyday practice, unprovable and unfalsifiable (at least to the degree that we cannot tell the difference between a good actor and someone genuinely feeling empathy; I suppose you might figure out something by measuring people's brain activity while they watch a torture scene).
I suppose you might figure out something by measuring people's brain activity while they watch a torture scene
Even then it is far from definitive. Experienced doctors, for example, lose a lot the ability to feel certain kinds of physical empathy - their brains will look closer to a good actor's brain than that of a naive individual exposed to the same stimulus. That's just practical adaptation and good for patient and practitioner alike.
[...] SIAI's Scary Idea goes way beyond the mere statement that there are risks as well as benefits associated with advanced AGI, and that AGI is a potential existential risk.
[...] Although an intense interest in rationalism is one of the hallmarks of the SIAI community, still I have not yet seen a clear logical argument for the Scary Idea laid out anywhere. (If I'm wrong, please send me the link, and I'll revise this post accordingly. Be aware that I've already at least skimmed everything Eliezer Yudkowsky has written on related topics.)
So if one wants a clear argument for the Scary Idea, one basically has to construct it oneself.
[...] If you put the above points all together, you come up with a heuristic argument for the Scary Idea. Roughly, the argument goes something like: If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.
The line of argument makes sense, if you accept the premises.
But, I don't.
Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It), October 29 2010. Thanks to XiXiDu for the pointer.